Anybody Read This Book?

Described as

A COMPELLING TALE OF 2,000 YEARS OF JEWISH HISTORY. A Jewish physician, Joseph, deserts his comrades in their final battle against Rome. Mortally wounded, a necromancer saves his life and bestows immortality upon him. The catch—Joseph will go into the long exile with his people and experience their humiliations, triumphs, and tragedies down through the corridors of time. And on one particular day of the year, he will live in dread, expecting personal tragedy to strike at the families he sires, the women he marries, and the children he cherishes.

and also thus

The book details the life of Joseph, a fictional Jewish physician/warrior at Beitar on the 8th of Av, the day before the final defeat of the Bar-Kochba rebellion by the Roman empire. Abandoning his comrades at arms, he deserts the city only to find himself attacked by Romans. Hanging between life and death, a mythical kabbalist offers Joseph the option of immortality -- with a catch. He must accompany the Jewish people into exile and in addition to bearing witness to the 9th of Av tragedies which would afflict the Jewish people for generations, the same day would mark personal calamities in his private life as well.

This 800 page book of historical fiction is a fascinating journey through Jewish life in the Middle East, Arabia, Spain, France, England, Germany and many parts of Europe from 135 c.e. at the fall of Beitar in Israel through the 1600's in the Netherlands. Joseph's travels take him through the ancient library of Alexandria, to the Parthian empire and the city of Nehardea where the Talmud was authored. Joseph meets and debates with the Amoraim; Shmuel, Rava, Rabba, Rav Ashi and Rabina.

My friend Marcia told me he seems to have been in Betar in Brooklyn due to lines from the youth movement anthem. Jameel has a mention on his blog from five years ago.

I'll be looking out for it.

Yesha in a New Book (But Why They All Walking Away?)

While we're on books, here's another I found:-





Joan Leegant's Wherever You Go:

Yona Stern is in Jerusalem to make amends with her sister, a stoic ideologue and mother of five who has dedicated herself to the radical West Bank settlement cause. Mark Greenglass, a former drug dealer saved by religion, has lost his passion and wonders if he’s done with God. Enter Aaron Blinder, an unstable college drop-out who finds a home on the violent fringe of Israeli society. The story of three Americans caught in the vortex of an unpredictable extremism

And more:

...her timely and brave first novel plunges its cast of vivid characters into the violent world of Israel's extreme right-wing fringe with rare insight and mesmerizing detail that equals, and even surpasses, the best of this tradition.

Wherever You Go is tautly structured around the alternating and distinct perspectives of Yona Stern, who travels from New York hoping to reconcile with her estranged sister who lives in one of the more radicalized West Bank settlements; Mark Greenglass, a successful Talmud teacher suddenly seized by an agonizing loss of faith; and Aaron Blinder, a shiftless youth burdened with a famous father whose novels featuring sentimentalized Holocaust victims and vengeful heroes inspire Aaron's horrific choices.

Through her uneasy gaze, we experience the feverishly messianic community of Givat Baruch, led by zealous patriarchs committed to the ``immutable truth'' that their land was given by ``divine edict 4,000 years before,'' whose wives and mothers (including Yona's sister) are willing to sacrifice their children should God demand that.

...Notwithstanding Leegant's suspenseful and emotionally wrenching indictment of the ruinous seduction of politico-religious fanaticism, her pitch-perfect renderings of individuals torn between earthly and heavenly Jerusalems are the true source of the novel's lingering power. Author of an acclaimed short-story collection, An Hour in Paradise, Leegant is a masterful weaver whose deft storytelling brings her diverse cast of conflicted characters and fraught themes into a powerful emotional and spiritual whole. Wherever You Go is a lively, full novel by an elegant, ironic writer who handles the topics of terror and messianic violence as agilely as she does love and redemption.

And try this book, My Before and After Life by Risa Miller.

Honey and Susan, two sisters in Boston, are shocked to learn that their elderly father has embraced Orthodox Judaism while on vacation in the Holy Land. His daughters fly to Israel to convince him to return, but when they get there they find it hard to communicate their concerns as he tries to educate them on the finer points of religious life. Honey feels abandoned and angry. But the anger turns into an emotion she can’t quite identify or accept during the course of the trip. And while she is still enraged, it becomes increasingly difficult for Honey to figure out exactly why she has condemned her father’s choice.

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Can I Intrigue You?

Is this not an intriguing statement:-

I’d always heard that if you understand kabbalah, you’ve probably got it wrong

If intrigued, read the book review of THE FROZEN RABBI By Steve Stern.



What is the book about?

Here's another book review summary:

The book's 370 pages are packed to bursting with epic adventure and hysterical comedy, with grim poignancy and pointed satire, as Stern repeatedly shifts time and tone to craft a wildly entertaining tale of the 20th-century Jewish experience and the paradox of tradition.

The author of seven works of adult fiction and two children's books based on Jewish folklore, Stern grounds his fantastical tale within the perfectly recognizable: "Sometime during his restless fifteenth year, Bernie Karp discovered in his parents' food freezer -- a white-enameled Kelvinator humming in its corner of the basement rumpus room -- an old man frozen in a block of ice." It seems that while meditating near a pond in Poland in 1889, the mystic Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr was flooded, frozen, cut into a block of ice and eventually left in the care of Bernie's great-great-grandfather Salo King (or Salo Frostbite, as he's soon called).

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The Literary Scene: The New Yiddishists

Found in Vanity Fair:

The New Yiddishists emerged during a turning point for American Jewish identity. Never in history have Jews been so integrated and accepted into the mainstream of a Diaspora country. Today, nearly half of American Jews marry outside the faith, while synagogue attendance continues its decline. Yiddish, a language that the majority of Jews once spoke, has been reduced (for most Jews) to a smattering of funny-sounding catchphrases and penis jokes. The generation of American Jews to which the New Yiddishists belong came of age questioning their sense of self. If you didn’t belong to a synagogue, keep kosher, or marry another Jew, then what exactly did it mean to be Jewish? Did it go beyond your DNA and a fondness for pastrami?

...American Jews began to feel a nagging sense of otherness again. At the same time, various cultural foundations were pouring millions of dollars into programs to stem the tide of assimilation. As a consequence, Jewish culture looked inward for the first time in decades.

...says Dara Horn...many of her generational peers have become more outwardly Jewish as they have gotten older. “When Jews came to this country, the way to piss off your parents was to eat pork and marry a shiksa,” Horn says. “Now the best way to piss off your parents is to go to Chabad [a Hasidic missionary organization], marry at 18, have 10 kids, and refuse to eat in their house because they’re not kosher enough.… But there’s also an opportunity to engage in Jewish life that didn’t exist for previous generations.”

That cultural renaissance has taken the form of magazines and Web sites such as Heeb, Jewcy, Guilt & Pleasure, and Nextbook; record labels (JDub) and micro-brews (He’Brew, “the Chosen Beer”); and countless grassroots initiatives in the arts and academia. For the first time in many decades (perhaps ever?), being Jewish—outwardly, proudly, Neil Diamond–ly Jewish—is cool, and the New Yiddishists are the literary vanguard of that. They are vastly more comfortable in their Jewish skin than previous generations of American Jewish writers ever were, and their stories reflect that...

Read on.

Books

A volume of the Venice edition of the Babylonian Talmud printed there between 1519-1523.

The story.

Off On a Jewess/Feminist Tangent

Jewess sent me over to a story in The Jewish Week on a feminist issue. And that is the worth of the new ArtScroll woman's siddur.

I will not debate that matter although I admit that my sympathies are not at all with ArtScroll due to my incapability of fathoming their Hareidi orientation as in no prayer for the state of Israel (when every Russian and Austrian siddur had a prayer for either the Czar of Emperor respectively) or for soldiers of the IDF.

What interested me is a bit more obsure:

...Ellen Frankel, CEO and editor in chief of the Jewish Publication
Society...“I admire ArtScroll greatly,” she said. But the company has created a model that shapes the work of others in the field. Every ArtScroll religious text has letters of endorsement from leading Orthodox rabbis reproduced in the first pages. Frankel said that she approached someone to support JPS’s new translation of “Mikraot Gedolot: The Commentators’ Bible.” Even before opening a newly published volume, the Orthodox donor asked which rabbis endorsed it, how observant the editor was and what rabbis he had studied with. “This donor wouldn’t even consider funding something unless he knew it was approved” by rabbis, said Frankel. “That was an interesting eye opener for me. It’s somewhat regrettable that Orthodox readers now
require a hechsher (stamp of kosher approval), and it doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of the scholarship or writing. There are many good books being published that would not be objectionable to a traditional reader, but they won’t open them.”

Dr. Frankel is the author of many books, including The Classic Tales: Four Thousand Years of Jewish Lore and The Encyclopedia of Jewish Symbols, and is also an accomplished story teller. Dr. Frankel received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University. But she is doing Jewish feminism no favor inexpressing her above opinion.

Jewish books for centuries have carried approbations, haskamot, from Rabbis and some have even been forged as they were that important to the author and the book's sales. They are a mine of bibliographical and historical information about persons, places and dates. And here's a nice haskama story:

...an approbation (הסכמה) written for R. Judah Leib Zirelsohn's collection of responsa, Gevul Yehudah (1906). The writer of the approbation was R. Eliyahu Hazan, who was then the Chief Rabbi of Alexandria, Egypt. R. Hazan apparently was not only very impressed with R. Zirelsohn, but was also quite disappointed with the quality of many books that had been written. Regarding Gevul Yehudah he wrote,

"The gentleman asked to send him an approbation for his book of responsa Gevul Yehudah which is soon to be published. He also sent me copies of the responsa which had already been published in order that I see them. Since then I have seen many books published which are not worth the damage done to the paper and printing, and they are not helpful or useful. On the other hand they contain that which will cause damage to religion and knowledge, and to my disappointment I saw in some of them the approbations of well-known rabbis. Maybe it is that they didn't know what was written in the book, or because of their great humility they weren't able to turn the authors away empty-handed. After this no person is able to judge a book and his author on the basis of the approbations that are in the beginning of the book. It is only after an examination of the contents of the book that one will know the worth of the book and the level of the author. Therefore I restrained myself as much as possible from writing an approbation for the book".

Now, back to Dr. Frankel. If she displays what I consider this little knowledge in the field of Jewish books, where is the JPS going and of what use is she to Jewish feminism?

Book Search

A priceless collection of antique manuscripts and books that has been missing since Nazi troops looted it from the synagogue in Rome may be languishing in an abandoned Soviet military archive.

After leads from Italy to Germany, Poland, France, Ukraine and the US, researchers have secured an agreement with Russia to help to find the 7,000-volume library, which that dates back to the 16th century.

There is good reason to believe that the collection could be in a warehouse or other undocumented location, Dario Tedeschi, a lawyer who has been leading efforts on behalf of the Italian Government, said. Yesterday he described the decades-long hunt as “trying to unravel a historical mystery”.

This week Enrico Letta, an Italian undersecretary, signed an agreement with Ekaterina Genieva, director of the Library of Foreign Literature in Moscow, to pursue the Soviet trail in an effort to bring the collection home. Ms Genieva, an expert in tracing documents, was responsible for the return of the Vienna Jewish community’s collection. The research is being funded by Unicredit Private Banking with a donation of €30,000 (£20,400).

The collection, known as the Library of the Jewish Communities, includes illuminated manuscripts, books and Torahs and Bibles printed in the 16th and 17th century. There are works of philosophy, mathematics and astronomy, as well as religious works. A 1324 copy of a treatise on medicine by the Arabic scholar and philosopher Avicenna was one of the library’s gems.

Two collections were housed in the synagogue complex in Rome’s ancient ghetto. One group of books was taken in October 1943, around the time that more than 1,000 Jews were rounded up to be sent to Nazi camps such as Auschwitz. The other was taken that December.

A Book Came Out of Hiding

Rav Eliezer Yehudah Waldenberg, known by his magnum opus of almost 20 volumes of Rabbinic responsa entitled "Tzitz Eliezer", recently died.

As the above referenced Wiki notes, "Rabbi Waldenberg also wrote a multivolume set on the practical issues of government called Hilkhot Medinah. In this work he takes issue with many positions of former chief rabbis Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, Shlomo Goren, and Isser Yehuda Unterman".

These three volumes almost did him in.

He was practically on the fringes of the Hareidi world which dominated Jerusalem Rabbinate politics in the 60s-70s-80s and it was only his connection with Shaarei Zedek together with his enormous intellectual range and specialization in the medical field that saved him.

Needless to say, it was impossible to purchase those books. Libraries had them but he never gave permission to reprint them out of fear. It suffered an act of "self-banning".

Well, I did write "was".

On the occasion of his shloshim, 30 days after his passing, the three books appeared in one volume. First the price was low, then it soared and now, I found a store where it is average.

His sons were in a fit. But several Rabbis were asked by book stores and sure enough, there are a few still around to be purchased. One store, deep in Geula-Zichron territory does so under-the-table in a black bag. Reminds me of Yeshiva high school days and certain magazines.

Any way, here's the frontpiece as proof:-



By the way, the book has almost 800 pages.